Why You’re Still Stuck on the Bus

At the last second, I bought a ticket for the Bx12 bus on Fordham Road in the Bronx. About 30 people were waiting at the stop, near the gates of Fordham University, two miles from my destination across the Harlem River in Upper Manhattan.

The Bx12 is one of a dozen bus lines in New York City designated as “select,” a kind of premium service with dedicated lanes and buses equipped with signals that are supposed to make the traffic lights change to speed them along. Riders pay the fare at street kiosks that issue a printed ticket, then can board through any door without swiping a MetroCard. Inspectors turn up unannounced to check if everyone has paid.

These tactics to make buses faster are standard in big cities around the world. Not in New York.

For instance, all-door boarding is already being done in London, San Francisco and Singapore. On the buses operated by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, it is available toonly about 12 percent of riders.

As the city’s population has climbed and tens of billions of dollars have been spent digging subway tunnels to irrigate real estate on the Far West Side of Manhattan, and to build a segment of a subway line along Second Avenue on the Upper East Side, the bus services used by millions of New Yorkers have spiraled downward. Ridership has declined by nearly 6 percent in the past decade.

And on average, buses are 10 percent slower than they were 25 years ago, Polly Trottenberg, commissioner of the city’s Transportation Department, told the City Council this month.

Riders’ advocates put it in starker terms.

“The slowest buses in the city clocked in at speeds slower than bumper cars, lumbering elephants, rowboats, human-power lawn mowers, a 5-year old on her tricycle and Hawaiian lava flows,” said Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. “At least 25 local buses take as long to go from the beginning to the end of their routes as it takes Amtrak to go from New York to Philadelphia. The city and the M.T.A. have ignored shockingly poor bus service for decades.”

Who rides the bus? Millions of people in the four boroughs outside Manhattan who live too far from a subway stop, or anyone who can’t climb stairs. The buses still carry an average of 2.5 million passengers a day — about the same as all forms of mass transit in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington combined.

The M.T.A., an agency dominated by the governor, has complete control of the subway system, tracks, tunnels and elevated trains. The buses, in contrast, operate in the congested, often chaotic terrain of the city’s streets and roads — which are ruled by a different agency, the city’s Transportation Department.

So for buses to get more green lights requires the M.T.A. to equip its vehicles with devices that can communicate with the traffic signal system run by the city agency. All 12,900 signals have the necessary gadgets, but it will be another year before the city’s engineering analysis is complete, Commissioner Trottenberg said. Both agencies could work faster, she said.

Many buses replaced streetcar lines that jagged and turned. The TransitCenter, a think tank, proposed straightening out routes in the “Turnaround” report.

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CreditMax Halton

There are other fixes: paying your fare by tapping a phone or a card; increasing select services; avoiding bunching. These strategies are used in other big cities. They involve complications in their application in New York, but that’s not why the city is so far behind. Over the last decade, New York has had a number of innovative transportation commissioners, but they run the streets, not the buses, which are the business of the M.T.A. The agency says it is studying ways to make bus trips better. Still, the plain fact is that buses have not gotten the same attention as subways.

“Buses are traditionally subject to disinvestment by the M.T.A., and the M.T.A is subject to disinvestment by the state,” said Nick Sifuentes, the deputy director of the Riders Alliance, which campaigns for increased transit services for people who cannot afford to live near subways.

By the way, on my ride from Fordham Road to Manhattan, I boarded at 12:07 p.m. The bus reached the end of the line at 207th Street and Broadway at 12:34, covering two miles in 27 minutes. That’s 4.4 miles per hour — faster than walking, but just barely.

Email: dwyer@nytimes.com

Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Why You’re Still Stuck on the Bus, After All These Years. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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